Vortcir brushed drops from his face with his shoulder. “I hear you well, Rahm. Your people are good folk—we even watch you, time to time.” Vortcir gave a quick laugh. “Perhaps yours are a finer people than my own. We strive for peace. But sometimes we do not achieve it. We Winged Ones, as you call us—sometimes we kill each other. We know this is wrong. When one of our number kills another, we catch him and mete out punishment.” He shrugged, an immense, sailed shrug. “It does not happen often.” Vortcir turned and splashed about with his other wing.
Rahm picked up a handful of wet sand and used it to scrub at his arm, at his shoulder. When blood came away from the cut he’d received last night, it stung. He looked at squat Vortcir—who stood, feet wide in the rushing foam. Both wings opened now, Vortcir raised his head. He began to mew.
Rahm looked up.
Suddenly and excitedly, Vortcir called: “My aunt nears!” Then at once he leapt. Twigs and water drops flew about. Rahm closed his eyes against the rush of leaves and dirt.
When he opened them, Vortcir was clearing the broken cliff, rising before the billowing cloud.
For a moment Rahm lost him. Then a moment later, he saw two Winged Ones, moving together and apart, circling, meeting, one soaring away, the other soaring after—till suddenly both were alighting on the rocks at the stream’s far bank.
Vortcir splashed forward, then turned and spoke somewhat breathlessly to the other: “Here is the groundling called Rahm who saved my life!”
The woman Winged One was a breadth larger than Vortcir in every direction: taller, deeper chested, broader sailed. She wore a brass chain around her neck and was clearly the elder. “You are a friend, then, groundling?” While rougher and aged, her voice was as high and as breathy as her nephew’s. “You have saved my fine boy; all men and women who fly will be grateful to you and give you honor.”
The grin had gone. There was only a smile on Rahm’s face now. “All?”
“Vortcir is Handsman of our nest!” she declared as if that explained everything. “Will you now come with us?”
Smiling mirth became smiling wonder: “Where?”
“To our nest in the high rocks—to Hi-Vator!”
“But how could I climb after thee, if—”
“Easily!” Mewing, Vortcir turned to his aunt. “He’s tall but scrawny! He can’t weigh much. Come, friend Rahm! Climb on my back.”
“Canst thou support me?” Rahm stood at the water’s edge. He had never thought of himself as light. But, shorter than Rahm by a head, still Vortcir was half again as heavy.
Rahm stepped across the water and behind Vortcir, who turned and bent to take him. Rahm grasped him over the shoulders. The furred back bunched beneath Rahm’s chest. On either side of him the leather sails spread and spread and spread! They did not beat but vibrated at first. Without any sense of motion at all—at first—the ground sank away. Then, at once, leaves in the trees above dropped toward them, fell below them. Rahm caught his breath, tightened his grasp. And the wings gathered and beat once more—and yes, they flew!
Looking down over Vortcir’s shoulder, Rahm saw far more rock below than green.
“How does it feel to fly, friend Rahm?” Vortcir called back. Then he cried to his aunt: “He’s light as a fledgling!” Vortcir’s mew rose. Rahm peered over Vortcir’s shoulder.
Some bare, some gorse-covered, rocks moved far below them. Wind stroked Rahm’s arms, his buttocks, his back. The smell of the fur on Vortcir’s neck was like the smell from a casket or cabinet in Ienbar’s cabin, long locked and suddenly opened. Sometimes they flew so steeply that Rahm hung against the thick back only by the hook of his arm. More often, they moved horizontally, so that Rahm lay prone on that body, broader than his own, even as his feet stuck free into the air. Sometimes it seemed they just floated, so that the sun warmed Rahm’s neck and the trough between his shoulders, and no wind touched him at all. At others, the wind pummeled Rahm’s face and arms and chilled his fingers (locked against Vortcir’s chest), till he wondered if he could hold much longer. The excitement of flight contracted Rahm’s stomach and made his heart hammer. He hugged more tightly to the flexing back.
Others had joined Vortcir and his aunt. As they descended, pitted cliffs rose. At last Vortcir’s feet scraped rock. Rahm caught his balance and stood alone once more, arms and chest tingling, while he looked at the great, windy back-beating maneuvers of the others landing about them—or at Vortcir’s own wing-beating, which finally stilled.
Drawing in his sails and breathing quickly (but not deeply; deep breaths seemed reserved for flight itself), Vortcir turned. “At Hi-Vator, here on the world’s roof, now you will see how those who fly can live.”
Others crowded in then. There was a general cry: “Vortcir! Handsman Vortcir! Vortcir has returned!”
Vortcir’s aunt pushed through. “But young Handsman, where is your chain of trust?”
Again Rahm noticed the chain around her own neck.
“I must have lost it when we were set upon by the terrible wailing.”
“You cannot very well go without it. As I wear the sign and trust of a Queen, so must our Handsman wear the sign and trust of one ready at any moment to become King.”
While this was going on, Rahm looked and blinked and looked again at these furred people, who stood so close to one another—in threes, fives, or sevens, always touching—but who now and then would explode into the air, soaring fifty, seventy-five, a hundred and fifty yards away from any fellows.
Already, in the margins of his takeoff with Vortcir and his aunt, at the rim of their ride together, and at the edge of their landing with the others, Rahm had learned that these were a people among whom the women’s furry breasts were scarcely larger than the men’s, and that the men’s genitals were almost as internal as the women’s. The distinction between the sexes was only minimally evident till one paused to urinate, as that male over there was doing, or when one of them was (as he realized at a glance to his left, where several were joking about a young female who evidently was) in a state of sexual excitement.
Carefully, while trying not to be caught staring, Rahm watched them. And in their close, nervous groups, with their small eyes they watched him back. They watched him from ledges above. They watched him from the rope nets strung from staid oak branch to staunch hemlock trunk—apparently the youngsters’ favorite place to play. They watched him from other, broader nets strung from the rocks down by the water to the higher ledges, thirty and forty yards overhead—where, it seemed, the elderly gathered to gossip, stretching their wings till they quivered. The watching was particularly strange because, by now Rahm knew, they were doing more listening than looking. What, he wondered, could they hear of him through their constant, mewing intercourse?
Within his first thirty minutes at Hi-Vator, Rahm saw a group of six winged children tease a smaller and younger child unmercifully. The older ones were—as far as he could tell—all boys. The little one was—most probably—a girl. The teasing reached such intensity that twice it became violent: had he been in his own home, Rahm would have stepped in to stop it. But now he could only look about uncomfortably for Vortcir or his aunt, both of whom happened, for the moment, to be somewhere else. Why, he wondered wildly, weren’t any other adults paying attention?
Within his first three hours there, Rahm observed a game where you sailed cunningly constructed toys made of twigs and thin leather from ledge to ledge, then took them into the sky to sail them from flier to flier. Also he saw two other children playing with a lemurlike pet. Then he became involved in what he only realized was another game after fifteen minutes of it, as first one then another Winged One politely volunteered to fly him now to this ledge, now to another, now to still one more: and he would grasp the warm, heavy shoulders and be carried here and there around the many ledges of the gorge in which their cave dwellings were sunk, either side of a silvery feather of falling water. Rahm had already noted, upon landing, that it was a lot easier to tell the s
ex of the Winged One—strong young female or male—who’d just carried him. From the giggling together of those waiting to ferry him about or the others who had just finished, Rahm realized—with sudden humor—that somehow with them this flying and carrying was a sexual game: and some others, he saw now, didn’t approve!
For ten minutes later, three older ones marched up and put a rather gruff end to it. The ones who’d been playing with him fluttered off. The older ones apologized to him in a way that, though he smiled and nodded and shrugged a lot, he didn’t quite see the point of—since there was no harm in it.
Three hours more, and he’d discovered that while the Winged Ones’ word for “star” was the same as his, they had no single word for “ear,” but more than ten for its various parts and functions. Also, from repeated inquiry, he finally decided they had no concept at all of the tomato plant.
“What are you thinking, my friend?” Vortcir asked, suddenly at his side, when Rahm, in those first three hours, had once more gone still a moment to stare off at those furry youngsters wrestling together by the falling water’s edge, or at the creatures who seemed to be grinding some sort of grain in the great circular stone troughs behind them, or just at the clouds behind them all, in the luminous mid-morning sky.
“I am thinking,” Rahm said, slowly and with consideration, “that, with perhaps here and there an exception that perplexes me”—he was recalling the children’s particularly violent teasing—“thou art a people, a people very like my own.”
—
And sitting in the sunlight, cross-legged on the blanket beside the wheel of his garbage cart, Qualt broke open a papaya. As its black seeds in their rich juice spilled out over the orange flesh in the morning, Qualt said: “Then, from what thou tellest me—with perhaps here and there something I do not quite understand—thy folk at Hi-Vator are…a people too, a people much like mine.” And the similarity of what Qualt said to what, miles up the mountain, Rahm was saying (and the vastly differing situations in which each said it) should begin to speak to you of the true differences between Qualt and Rahm.
Qualt tossed half the fruit.
Perched on the wooden frame of some overturned bench that was not used anymore in the village, but which sat here among the detritus lying about in the young garbage collector’s yard, it reached out a great wing. The tines at its end caught the fruit and brought it back to the small, dark face. It bit, and juice and seeds ran down the fur at both sides of the mouth. It mewed, resettling itself. “Good! Hey, groundling, my sister was a rude, rough girl who went with the other poor girls to collect the filaments the cave beasts spin, up in the rocks, to make our ropes and hunting nets and webs. But I was only a mischief-maker, too lazy even to help them there. No, my people often thought that I was not a good one. So I took to wandering—flying here, flying there, listening now to these ones, now to those! Even when I was coming back, I saw one of your men fighting with a lion, and dropped to give him my help, but one of those others seared my wing with the kind of flaming evil we saw last night.”
“It’s a killing evil!” Qualt bit his fruit. “And that’s why thou must do as I say. If we keep on, my friend, like we’ve begun this morning—”
At which point there was jingling from behind the house.
Qualt was on his feet. “Quick now, as I told thee.” He sprinted off through the junk strewn about the yard toward the house corner, to step around it, over moist rocks and three piles of old pots—some broken, some nested in one another, hollyhocks grown up between them.
The path up to the garbage collector’s shack was narrow, and you couldn’t walk without brushing the low branches. Long ago Qualt had strung a rope between those branches, which, if any of them were hit, rang a goat’s bell he’d fixed to a post near the front door.
“Hey, there, Qualt,” came a familiar voice. Old Hara pushed from the path end. “I wondered if you were home.”
Qualt went forward.
“Ah, boy, this is a deadly day!” Yes, it was Hara, with the white in her hair like the froth of the quarry falls, with her skirt the colors of leaves and earth and hides. “Phew!” Her face wrinkled even more as she came barefoot toward the house. “How do you stand the stink?”
“Why dost thou come here, Hara? Why dost thou come here after what happened in the town last night?”
The weaver shook her head. “I go to a council meeting. You know that Ienbar, among so many, was killed—burned to death at his shack by the burial meadow.”
“Not Ienbar too? But where are they meeting, Hara? Not in the council building?”
The old woman shook her head. “No, boy, the Myetrans are there now. But it’s not a meeting you can linger about the edges and overhear. Not this time.” She reached out and pushed the side of Qualt’s head playfully with her knuckles. “Oh, maybe when a bit more of youth’s foolishness has gone out of thee and some more of wisdom has settled between thy ears—but there’s no need for anyone to know where we meet now. The Myetrans are still about all over the town. And they do not want us meeting. No, not after last night.”
“Yes,” Qualt said. “I see.” Hara crossed toward the corner of the house. Qualt hurried after her, just as she stepped around the pots and hollyhocks. But the backyard, with the junk strewn about in it and the garbage cart to the side, was empty.
“It won’t be an easy meeting, though, I tell you, boy! There’s seven hundred and forty people here at Çiron—oldsters and babes among those. While the Myetrans—well, there are thousands of them, it seems! And we have to figure out a way to—”
“Hara,” Qualt said. “Hara, there’re not thousands of them!”
She stopped and looked at him.
Qualt crumpled the papaya rind and flung it into the bushes. “There’re not thousands of them. There’re not hundreds of them! There’re a hundred eighty-seven. Perhaps I’m off by five or six—up or down. But not by more!”
Hara frowned. “And how dost thou know, little dirty fingers?”
“Because I counted!”
“When didst thou count?”
“Earlier this morning. They get their camp up at sunrise and I…I counted. A hundred eighty-seven. A few more than half of them are in the village. Somewhat less than half are at their camp. There’s a group of five whom all the others obey. They stay in three tents that are larger than the others, at the back of the encampment; the mounted one with the beard who killed Rimgia’s father last night is one of them. Then, among the rest, there are ten who wear the black clothes, with the black cloaks and hoods. These ride horses and tell their men, the ones who have only the swords and their metal and leather plates bound to them, where to go and what to do. The black ones and the five leaders alone have the powerguns, the things they killed Kern and Tenuk and…killed so many with. Powerguns are what they call these; someone overheard them speak the word and told me. And there’re no more than twenty powerguns among them—and a dozen are resting, at any one time. That’s another thing they have to do—after they fire them twenty or thirty times, they have to let them rest a while so the guns regain their fire. Someone…I heard them joking about them when they rounded up some forty-three of our people, wounded all, but who could still walk, and herded them into a wire corral where they have them imprisoned.”
“Forty-three of us imprisoned?” Hara exclaimed. “Ah, thank the generous earth! For in town, they’ve started to count the bodies of those who were killed, and there seemed to be more than thirty missing. Do you know who the corralled ones are, Qualt? Do you know which ones are their prisoners? You tell us that, and it would ease a lot of sick hearts, boy.”
“I can tell you that and I can tell you more, though I’ll have to learn it later. But there are men in black, who, with the five leaders, have the powerguns.”
Hara had started walking again.
“But tell the council, Hara! There are five in charge. And only a hundred eighty-seven all together—give or take four or five!”
“You can
believe I’ll tell them, boy! You can believe it.” Hara went on toward the quarry road, making for wherever the village council had decided to hold its meeting.
Qualt stood in the yard, breathing hard—as though the imparting of the information had been a sudden and painful effort.
You see, he was a very different person from Rahm.
Over the edge of Qualt’s roof thrust a sharp face with scooped ears. A moment later, a shadow flapped.
Qualt turned as the Winged One moved out onto the air—as if air were water and the Winged One pushed off into it as Qualt might push off from the quarry shore…and Qualt himself were looking up at it as a fish might look from the lake bottom.
The Winged One sailed over the yard full of the things that, now and again, curious Qualt had rescued from the irredeemable arc into the ravine, a kind of sculpture garden of furniture, farm equipment, and even more unrecognizable stuff, pieces leaning in odd positions, an occasional rope drawn from one to the other from which some pot or bit of houseware hung.
Flapping wings settled till the Winged One perched on the corner of Qualt’s garbage wagon. One sail out for balance, the Winged One moved the other’s edge across his mouth, knocking away the little seeds that had stuck to his face fur. “Say, groundling—there! You’ve told what we learned aloft this morning to one of your elders, like you wanted. Do you think that now you’ll let me take you up to Hi-Vator? There it would be fun, and you wouldn’t have to hide like you say I have to here! Though there I might still have to hide from a few, because some folk there—some even of my own family—do not like me as much as all that!” The Winged One laughed out shrilly, the mighty sails out full—on which, with the sunlight behind them, Qualt could see scars that spoke of violence and adventure. “Sometimes I think I cannot—or perhaps I should not—go back to Hi-Vator. Oh, there’re not many up there who listen for my return. Other times I think maybe I should go visit them, with one of you groundlings on my back to surprise them, as though I were a Handsman or a noble, who could make and break such laws at will. But if I could make and break such laws, then I would not be the outlaw I am. Oh, I assure you—I’m only a little outlaw. Don’t fear me, friend. I never broke any big laws. I just forget and do what I want sometimes, and discover it wasn’t what someone else wanted me to do. Then I have to fly.”
A, B, C: Three Short Novels Page 34